It Was Never About You: What Going Home Taught Me About Childhood Wounds, Grief and Compassion
I am sitting in my childhood home in Quebec as I write this.
It is grey outside. The kind of grey that feels like death. I have been here for four days now, and I will be honest with you, it has been one of the hardest stretches of time I have navigated in recent times. Not just because I lost my brother a week ago. But because grief, I am learning, does not just crack you open to anger and sadness. It cracks you open to everything...seeing life differently...seeing people differenlty too.
Let's start here...
I arrived at the airport carrying the a kind of exhaustion that long-haul travel brings, the kind where your body is somewhere before your soul has caught up. And waiting for me, completely unexpectedly, was one of my oldest friends. Flowers in her hands. And a bottle of my favourite salad dressing from when I was a little girl, the kind of detail that only someone who truly *sees* you would think of.
I cried before I even said hi.
That moment, that one simple, generous, *seen* moment, set the tone for everything that followed. Because what came next was its exact opposite.
We went back to my parents' place. My friend was there. And within the hour, my mother said, out loud, that she was *relieved* my brother had passed. Because he had stressed her out with all his problems...
I am not going to pretend I did not hear that correctly...but my mum can say some stupid stuff without meaning it...
And I am not going to write about it from a place of anger or victimhood, because I have done enough inner work to know that her words were not really about my brother, and they were never really about me. They were the words of a woman who has never learned how to hold pain, so she converts it into something she can manage. Distance. Criticism. Deflection.
But I will tell you this: I sat with those words in my body for a long time afterwards. Because my brother and I always felt like we were too much for this house. That we were burdens. That we took up more space than was welcome. And hearing it said out loud, when I felt a little fragile, even if it was wrapped in my mother's particular way of defence mechanism, confirmed something I had carried quietly my whole life...
What Grief Reveals
Here is what nobody tells you about grief: it is not just about the person you lost.
It is about every unfinished thing. Every conversation that never happened. Every version of a relationship that was hoped for and never arrived. My brother and I were not close,
life, distance, and the particular complexity of our shared history meant that we lived parallel lives more than intertwined ones. And yet I am grieving him deeply. Because I am also grieving the relationship we never got to have, as adults. The phone call we never made. The version of family that existed in my imagination but not in reality.
My parents are walking through this house in circle. My father pretends nothing has happened. My mother oscillates between moments of unexpected softness and her default sharpness, questioning sometimes why I am crying when I did not speak to him much, worrying aloud about whether she will have to take responsibility for my brother's 13yrs old daughter.
I watch them and I feel something that is not quite sadness and not quite anger...
I got curious, because curiosity is the only tool I know that does not cause more damage so I asked my mother: How would you like it to be? What do you need? How things could be easier for you? She did not know. And in that moment, something softened in me. Because I understood that this was never a lack of love. It was always a lack of knowledge. She genuinely does not know how to create meaningful connection with people. She never learned. She has spent her whole life protecting herself from a world that felt unsafe, and the walls she built to stay safe also kept everyone else out. Including us.
That is not personal to me. It never was.
The Reality You Perceive Is the Life You Create
I have spent years studying the mind, kinesiology, NLP, hypnosis, Human Design, and if there is one truth that underpins all of it, it is this:
The reality you perceive is the reality you live in. And the reality you live in is the reality that shapes and creates your life.
My parents sees a world that is heavy, threatening, exhausting, and finite. And so their days reflect exactly that. Up at 4am, tv, gym, take a takeaway coffee, never thinking to ask if I might like one, news on the tv for hours, in pyjamas by 3pm in the afternoon. Days that begin with urgency and end in fatigue, filled with tasks that serve no deeper purpose than to make the hours pass. My mother at 930am decide it was *too late* to cook a ham for dinner that takes 90 minutes...
I do not say this to judge them. I say it because I recognise it as a pattern I have been afraid of inheriting. And I say it because watching it so clearly from the outside is one of the most confronting gifts this trip has offered me.
When we believe the world is against us, we organise our entire lives around surviving it. We do not make the ham. We do not ask if someone else might want a coffee. We do not let people in. We do not grieve openly, because if we open that door, who knows what else might come through.
And what we do not realise is that the very walls we built to protect ourselves from the world are also the walls that keep the beauty, the warmth, the aliveness of life from ever reaching us.
The Blessing Hidden...
I was put into full-time care at three weeks old.
For most of my life, I held that as a wound. A story about being unwanted. About being too much, too needy, too inconvenient. But I am sitting with it differently now.
Because the other family that cared for me, they were warm. They were present. They were safe. And somewhere in my three-week-old nervous system, I received something my parents' home could not have given me: the felt experience of being held with gentleness.
Maybe my mother knew, on some deep subconscious level, that she could not give me what I needed. Maybe sending me into care was not abandonment, maybe it was the most loving thing she knew how to do. Forgiveness, I have come to understand, is not about excusing what hurt us. It is about releasing the story that it was never personal. It was never about me. It was always about what they had available to give.
And then there are my school friends.
Ten of us. Sisters in every way that matters. They saved me growing up, we saved/helped each other, and I am going to see them while I am here, and I already know that those hours with them will feel like breathing again after days of holding my breath.
My parents gave me that. They chose that school. And in that choice, whether they knew it or not, they handed me the people who would shape me into who I am today.
What I Am Learning
I am a Kinesiologist. I help people understand the language their body speaks, and the patterns stored in their nervous system that quietly run the show. I sit with people every week who are carrying exactly the kind of weight I am sitting with right now, the grief, the childhood wounds, the patterns inherited from people who were doing the best they could with what they had.
And I will tell you something: being here, in this house, in this grief, doing this work in real time rather than in the safety of a session room, it is humbling. It is hard. And it is also the most alive I have felt in a long time.
Because I am not numbing it. I am not performing okayness. I am sitting with all of it, the love for a brother I never got close enough to, the grief for a family dynamic I always hoped would soften, the discomfort of being here and I am letting it move through me rather than trying to hold on to it.
The price of negativity, is not just unhappiness. It is a life lived in a very small room, with very thick walls, missing the entire expanse of what was always available just beyond them.
And the invitation of grief, if we are brave enough to accept it, is to choose differently. To let it crack us open not just to sadness, but to love, love every day, choose love and kindness. Ask yourself: What reality am I perceiving? And is it the reality I actually want to be living? I believe you get to choose...
A Note to You, if you still reading...
If you are carrying something heavy right now, a loss, a family wound, a quiet grief that does not have a clear name, I want you to know that you do not have to have it all figured out to move forward.
You just have to be willing to feel it. Get curious about it. Ask: What did I make this mean about me? And is that actually true?
That is where healing begins.
Not in the fixing. In the feeling.
I will be back in Australia in six days. I will be breathing easier. I will carry my brother with me, not as a weight, but as a reminder of what matters. Connection. Presence. The choice to show up fully, even when it is terrifying...and to LOVE
That is the life I am building...what are you building???
Big love
Em
Emilie is a Kinesiologist, Life Coach in training, and Human Design practitioner based in Australia. She works with people who are ready to stop performing okayness and start living authentically. If this resonated with you, you are welcome to reach out.
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